A wonderful comment on life – you can come up with as many fine formulae as you like, it will sooner or later defy our clever definitions. 

Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas. 

Part of me says, ‘Thank goodness’. 

For other comments on this elusive thing called life, see Thoreau, wise enough to question rather than define what it’s about, and Keats, who meanwhile conjurs up a good working metaphor. 

Source: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, trans. by Lewis Galantière (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 98

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